For most of Bangkok’s 220 years, new western visitors noticed one thing about the city: how Chinese it was.

This started before the city was founded. Three years earlier, a Danish botanist wandered around the swampy site. He visited a Chinese chemist. He noted that the “swimming houses” were full of Chinese “shoemakers, pewterers, colour-merchants etc.” He found the Chinese temple much bigger and flashier than the Siamese wat. He counted the number of “Chinese boats” coming laden down the river.

Fifty years later, the swamp had been transformed into one of the great port-capitals of Asia. European visitors reckoned that half to three-quarters of the population was Chinese. They carried out “every occupation known to man”. Their houseboats covered the river. Their brick shophouses lined the two miles of the “Chinese bazaar” and gave the city its architectural character. Visitors to the palace and noble houses noted the elite wore Chinese silk, sat on Chinese chairs, and ate off Chinese porcelain.

The city was so Chinese because its spectacularly rapid rise had come from the junk trade with China. The first three kings were as much merchants as rulers. King Rama I dubbed one of his sons jao sua, the Chinese terms for a merchant prince, because he was such a good trader. His (Chinese) finance minister was known as the “junk millionaire”. King Rama II personally supervised the loading of his junks’ cargoes. King Rama III was one of the biggest junk traders in Asia before his accession, and one royal brother was his nearest competitor. All the first three kings worked with Chinese partners, and accepted their daughters into the inner palace.

They were also proud of their connections to the Asian superpower. As a pet project, Rama III built Wat Ratch-orot using a totally Chinese design, Chinese craftsmen, and a heap of Chinese building materials. His restoration of the royal Wat Pho gave it a distinctly Chinese feel which persists to this day. At Wat Yannawa he fashioned a chedi round a wonky model of a Chinese junk as a tribute to the junk's role in building Bangkok. At his funeral, huge Chinese statues stood guard, “wealthy Chinese merchants and tax farmers” trooped through the funeral pavilion, nobles were ordered to shave their heads in imitation of Chinese practice, and the king was sent to his next life in a blaze of burning paper.

But then the world changed. Imperial China began to crumble. The western imperialists gobbled up Asia. Siam’s elite swivelled their attention from east to west. They took off the Chinese silk and put on British serge.

Among the imports from the west was the idea that modern countries were nations formed on the basis of a single race. The Thai elite stopped celebrating the diversity of its population. It adopted a fairy story about the Thai being a lost tribe which wandered out of the north and drifted south from Sukhothai, through Ayutthaya to Bangkok.

Years of confusion followed. On the one hand, Bangkok’s population became if anything more and more Chinese as migrants fled China’s war, revolution, and scarcity. On the other hand, the city was now imagined as the capital of a distinctly Thai nation. Most Chinese migrants and their descendants found ways to deal with this confusion. After all, Siam was a lot more pleasant place to be for the time being. But many were uneasy about denying a great heritage. And some objected to the fairytale national history which obscured the capital city’s origins and the Chinese contribution.

In the 1980s, things changed. The city began to boom. The great Chinese merchant families could claim some of the credit. The second and third generations of the last migrant waves had climbed to positions of influence in government, education, and the media. Democratic institutions provided ways to convert merchant wealth into political position.

The official view of the Thai nation and its origins was still sacrosanct. But people found ways around it. Chinese language education revived. Books which re-educated people about Chinese learning, culture, festivals and heritage became best-sellers. A series of TV dramas told the whole story of the Bangkok Chinese including the success of the junk trade, the delicacies of dealing with the new national state, the rise of the great merchant dynasties, the difficulties of converting these into modern corporations, and the excitement of rediscovering kin and origins after China reopened.

Historians quietly began to write the Chinese back into the national story. They shifted attention away from Sukhothai and its distinctly Thai character, to Ayutthaya which was always a cosmopolitan port with a large Chinese role. They found the Chinese fathers-in-law in the dynastic family trees.

The bust of 1997, when some of the greatest of the merchant dynasties were undermined, punctured this growing confidence. But only slightly and only temporarily. The emergence of China as a world power is more than enough to compensate. The TV dramas are returning. Models, singers and actors with very distinctly Chinese looks have begun to compete with the luk-kreung. The Thai dialect spoken by the fashionable Bangkok young is losing the hard consonants absent in Chinese dialects. Historians now argue that the Thai tribe did not wander down from the north, but from southern China. They suggest that the peoples of China-below-the-Yangzi and the peoples of Southeast Asia come from the same stock. They may have been separated and divided over two millennia of migrations and invasions, but ultimately they share a common heritage.

The celebration of Bangkok’s 220 years focuses on Bangkok as a place and especially as a collection of monuments. It is still too difficult to confront Bangkok as the varied collection of people who made the place and the monuments, particularly in the city’s early years. Maybe by the 250^th birthday. Maybe.